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Fraud*According to the Collins English Dictionary 10th Edition fraud can be defined as: "deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage".[1] In the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation. Defrauding people or entities of money or valuables is a common purpose of fraud, but there have also been fraudulent "discoveries", e.g. in science, to gain prestige rather than immediate monetary gain*As defined in Wikipedia

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

By this time, we should have been reading about how Goldman Sachs executives were being criminally prosecuted for CDO fraud and we should have been anticipating that they would spend some time in jail. It didn't happen and it looks like it won't happen. Instead we read about how Goldman Sachs sets aside billions of dollars purely for fighting any litigation that points their way. At first, Goldman Sachs set aside $3.4 billion for such legal matters. They revised this to $2.7 billion and now they are saying that $2 billion will probably be adequate.

Yves Smith asks the question that so many have been asking: Why are the big banks getting off scot-free? We know that Goldman Sachs laid out the groundwork for their own position long before the meltdown took place. We know the names of their people who prepared the way: Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, Gary Gensler, Arthur Levitt, Joshua Bolton, Kenneth D. Brody, Jon Corzine, Mario Draghi, etc. Their names are infamous. Their goal appears to have been achieved.

The following paragraph from Yves Smith's essay has Goldman Sachs written all over it:

The critical language comes in Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Act of 1934:

It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce, or of the mails or of any facility of any national securities exchange, (a) To employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud, (b) To make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading, or (c) To engage in any act, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon any person, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.

Yet there is undeniable evidence of institutionalized fraud, such as widespread document fabrication in foreclosures (mentioned in the motion filed by New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman opposing the $8.5 billion Bank of America settlement with investors) and the embedding of impermissible charges (known as junk fees and pyramiding fees) in servicing software, so that someone who misses a mortgage payment or two is almost certain to see it escalate into a foreclosure. And these come on top of a long list of runup-to-the-crisis abuses, including mortgage bonds having more dodgy loans in them than they were supposed to, banks selling synthetic or largely synthetic collateralized debt obligations as being just the same as ones made of real bonds when the synthetics were created for the purpose of making bets against the subprime market and selling BBB risk at largely AAA prices, and of course, phony accounting at the banks themselves.

The private actions stand in stark contrast to the few credit crisis cases brought by the Justice Department, which is wrapping up many of its inquiries into big banks without filing any charges. The lack of prosecutions — the Justice Department has brought three cases against employees at large financial companies and none against executives at large banks — has left private litigants, mainly investors and consumers, standing more or less alone in trying to hold financial parties accountable.

“When federal authorities don’t fulfill their obligation to enforce the law, they essentially give an imprimatur to the financial entities to do whatever they want and disregard the law,” said Kathleen C. Engel, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. “To the extent there are places where shareholders and borrowers can pursue claims, they are really serving the function of the government. They are our private attorneys general.”

7
COMMENTS:

Anonymous
said...

Think about this,"What kind of bank anticipates that it will have legal problems that require billions of dollars to take care of? What happened to honesty in banking where, when the law is adhered to, there should be no legal proceedings against the bank? How could a bank be so corrupt? "

Who are they paying?...Ahh..legal?..which is the other revolving door...the justice system.

The same way under the table brown bag money has been laundered through appointments, donations, book sales, etc...where do the regulators on the judicial side go when they leave....THE LAW FIRMS!

While the civil lawsuit is one of many raising similar charges against the expanding for-profit college industry, the Education Management case is the first in which the government intervened to back whistle-blowers' claims that the company consistently violated federal law by paying recruiters based on how many students they enrolled. The suit also said that each year, Education Management falsely certified that if was complying with the law, making it eligible to receive student financial aid.

Education Management, which is based in Pittsburgh and is 41 percent owned by Goldman Sachs, enrolls about 150,000 students in 105 schools operating under four names: Art Institute, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University.

July 7 (Bloomberg) -- Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt discusses the $15 billion loan Goldman Sachs & Co. received from the U.S. Federal Reserve in December 2008, the biggest single loan from a little-known lending program whose details have been secret until yesterday. Levitt talks with Erik Schatzker and Bob Ivry on Bloomberg Television's "InsideTrack." Levitt is a policy adviser to Goldman Sachs Group and a board member of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News. (Source: Bloomberg)

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/72058358/

Why?

*We have only one monetary policy. Juice stock multiples. This is the farthest thing from “Progressive” economics as you can get. We have a policy in place that is designed to make wealthy people wealthier. At some point there will be a social cost to this. The fires and riots in London were triggered by a shooting. Underneath is a rage between haves and have nots. Shame on the Fed for rigging the outcome for fat cats. Double shame on them for when our streets are filled with rage.

In summary, HFT algos reduce the value of resting orders and increase the value of how fast orders can be placed and cancelled. This results in the illusion of liquidity. We can't understand why this is allowed to continue, because at the core, it is pure manipulation.

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